Ashes and Embers

A hitchhiker named Martel Gordone gets in a fight with two bikers over a prostitute, and one of the bikers is killed. Gordone is arrested and sent to prison, where he joins the prison's boxing team in an effort to secure an early parole and to establish his dominance over the prison's toughest gang.

In 1902, a Gullah family on the Sea Islands off South Carolina decide whether to migrate to the mainland, risking their unique cultural heritage.

Daydream Therapy is set to Nina Simone’s haunting rendition of “Pirate Jenny” and concludes with Archie Shepp’s “Things Have Got to Change.” Filmed in Burton Chace Park in Marina del Rey by activist-turned-filmmaker Bernard Nicolas as his first project at UCLA, this short film poetically envisions the fantasy life of a hotel worker whose daydreams provide an escape from workplace indignities. —Allyson Nadia Field

An African-American man working at a slaughterhouse in the Watts area of Los Angeles leads a dissatisfied and listless existence.

Charlie Banks, chronically unemployed, struggles to find dignity and a meaning for life in the impoverished Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts.

A naive young woman moves from the South to stay with her aunt and uncle in Compton. As an outsider, she struggles at first to find her footing, but soon falls into the middle of a community of rebellious youth. She soon becomes more and more aware of the social injustices of the big city.

An enigmatic drifter from the South comes to visit an old acquaintance who now lives in South-Central LA.

A young African-American man, living in Los Angeles without direction in his life, reluctantly agrees to be the best man for his brother, an upwardly mobile lawyer.

Dorothy is a poor black woman. Her husband is put in jail for no observable reason, and she is pregnant with a second child. The government threatens to take away her welfare if she does not get an abortion.

Eddie Warmack, an African American jazz musician, is released from prison for the killing of a white gangster. Not willing to play for the mobsters who control the music industry, including clubs and recording studios, Warmack searches for his mentor and grandfather, the legendary jazz musician Poppa Harris.

In this meditative film the everyday lives of poor Ethiopian peasants are shown using documentary as well as storytelling techniques, with its drama arising out of the timeless yet persistent issues of their lives.

Filmed in response to the LAPD’s shooting of Eulia Love in 1979, Gidget Meets Hondo opens with stills taken by Bernard Nicolas of a demonstration against Love’s killing. Nicolas’ Gidget is a self-absorbed young white woman who remains clueless to the violence erupting around her, ultimately to her own peril. The film asks whether such police brutality would be tolerated if the victim were a middle-class white woman.